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At the U.S. Naval Academy, a replica blue banner hangs in Memorial Hall stitched with a stubborn command: "DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP." The words were sewn onto Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s battle flag in 1813, borrowing the dying words of Captain James Lawrence during the War of 1812. The words became a reminder of discipline—hold fast, do your duty, and keep your head when everyone else is losing theirs. It is odd, then, that this week’s explosive argument over military obedience is about whether reminding troops to follow the law is itself "seditious"—and even, as the president claimed, "punishable by DEATH." The law does allow death for military sedition, but the U.S. military also hasn’t executed anyone since 1961. And a recent survey shows that when you teach service members the law, their willingness to carry out illegal orders falls sharply. There is a gap between this week’s typically thunderous exchanges and the reality on the ground.
Common Knowledge
In a 90-second video posted by six Democratic lawmakers with military or intelligence backgrounds, the message to service members was simple: "Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders." Senator Elissa Slotkin said: "We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution. Don’t give up the ship." The group later said, "What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law."
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President Donald Trump detonated in reply. "This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country.…SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???" he wrote, adding in a separate post, "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" The White House said he was not calling for executions but argued the lawmakers’ clip was "perhaps…punishable by law," because it encouraged troops to defy the commander in chief’s lawful orders.
Republican leaders largely criticized the Democrats' video, with Speaker Mike Johnson calling it "wildly inappropriate" while also saying he didn’t believe Trump was inciting violence and that the president was "defining a crime." Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller labeled it an "insurrection—plainly, directly, without question," and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mocked it as "Stage 4 TDS." Yet some Republicans distanced themselves: Senator Lindsey Graham called the Democrats’ appeal "despicable" but said Trump’s response went too far.
Democrats framed the president’s rhetoric as dangerous. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer warned on the Senate floor that Trump was "lighting a match in a country soaked with political gasoline." Senator Chris Murphy called the comments "extraordinary" and a threat to lawmakers’ safety, while House Democratic leaders urged Trump to delete the posts "before he gets someone killed."
Uncommon Knowledge
Under 10 U.S.C. § 894 (UCMJ Article 94), mutiny or sedition may be punished by death or other penalties as a court-martial directs. But this is extraordinarily rare in practice: the last U.S. military execution took place on April 13, 1961, when Private John A. Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth. Even the military’s most notorious modern case—Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hasan—has moved slowly; the Supreme Court denied his petition in March 2025, and any execution still requires presidential approval and administrative steps. This is a deterrent on paper, not a lever that shapes day-to-day obedience.
In June 2025, the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Human Security Lab surveyed 818 active-duty service members about unlawful orders. It found that 80 percent of troops could explain, in their own words, the duty to refuse manifestly unlawful commands. Only 9 percent said "I’d always obey," 9 percent said "don’t know," and 2 percent declined to answer. The most common example of an unlawful order was "harming civilians."
More revealing still is the experiment embedded in that survey. When a nuclear-strike scenario ("Would you obey an order to bomb a civilian city?") was asked first, 69 percent said they would obey. But when reminded about the duty to refuse unlawful orders, the share willing to obey fell by 13 points to 56 percent. A similar pattern appeared in other scenarios: explicitly noting that shooting civilians violates international law increased stated refusal by 8 points. The threat of the death penalty did not enter into any of these shifts. Legal clarity did.
That matters for this week’s argument. Trump’s posts cite the harshest text in the code; the UMass data measures what moves troops. Military obedience is built on a presumption that orders are lawful. The same framework also imposes a duty to refuse orders that are manifestly unlawful—the kind any person of ordinary understanding would recognize as criminal.
So what are the left and right really arguing about? The right fears that popularizing "refuse unlawful orders" becomes, in practice, a permission structure for policy resistance. The left fears that downplaying the duty to refuse normalizes obedience to obvious abuses. Both risks may exist. But most personnel already understand the duty to disobey obvious illegality—and reminding them of it nudges more of them toward lawful behavior when the stakes are at their most extreme.
If politicians in Washington want illegal orders disobeyed, or military obedience upheld—two principles that do not contradict each other in practice, the vast majority of the time—the UMass experiment points to the lever that works: education. Not scary posts.
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